Is Ben Stein being a good Samaritan or total creep?

You know Ben Stein. He was in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, hosted Win Ben Stein’s Money and has appeared on numerous TV shows through the years. He’s 69.

And now he’s defending himself in a Page Six story centering around Tanya Ma, 24, a pregnant performance artist who wants Stein to stop hitting on her. Or as Gawker put it: “Horny Ben Stein wants to hug and kiss a pregnant lady.”

“It’s much more than sexting, cyber-escorting or being a sugar daddy — it’s unhealthy and toxic behavior that needs to be exposed,” Ma, who once worked as an “escort” and is now a “fledgling writer,” tells Page Six.

Stein mentioned Ma in a (fairly creepy) column for the American Spectator in June, in which he wrote about falling in love with young beautiful women as he travels the country giving speeches.

“My main obsessions in my life are my wife, my dog, my son and his family, my secret gf from Mississippi, and any beautiful girl I meet. I am like a teenager. I get mad crushes and they last about ten minutes. Maybe less.”

He detailed meeting Ma and striking up a texting relationship with her, but didn’t say how it all ended up.

Now Ma says the latest is that, earlier this month, Stein wanted to put her in a hotel “near where he lives” in Los Angeles. But “the day before I was supposed to meet him, he texted me” about wanting to touch and kiss, she said.

“I knew he had developed a crush on me, but it just started to get weird,” she says.

But Stein tells Page Six it’s all innocent:

“Here’s the real story: Ben Stein has never had any criminal charge or any ethical blemish in his life, she tells him a sob story, he helps her out to the amount of thousands, she said she’s going to have a baby and the father of the baby wasn’t going to help her out,” he says of himself.

“I didn’t expect anything from her. Hugging and kissing doesn’t mean I wanted to (have sex with) her. I said that explicitly in my text. When is it wrong to hug people?”